The Media Line: UK Rights Group Calls 2025 the ‘Bloodiest Year of Executions’ in Saudi Arabia  

UK Rights Group Calls 2025 the ‘Bloodiest Year of Executions’ in Saudi Arabia  

By The Media Line Staff  

Human rights groups have called out Saudi Arabia for surpassing its record number of executions for the second year in a row, with most of them for drug offenses, the BBC reports.  

The year 2025 has been the “bloodiest year of executions in the kingdom since monitoring began,” according to the UK-based rights group Reprieve, which tracks capital punishment in the Gulf nation and has clients on death row.  

According to the group’s data, at least 347 people have now been put to death this year, up from a total of 345 in 2024.  

Around two-thirds were convicted of nonlethal drug-related offenses, which the UN says is “incompatible with international norms and standards.”  

More than half of them were foreign nationals who appear to have been put to death as part of a “war on drugs” in the kingdom.  

Most recently, two Pakistani nationals were executed for drug-related offenses. This year, a journalist, two men who were minors when arrested for protesting, and five women were executed.  

Saudi authorities have not responded to the BBC’s request for comment.  

“Saudi Arabia is operating with complete impunity now,” said Jeed Basyouni,  Reprieve’s head of death penalty for the Middle East and North Africa. “It’s almost making a mockery of the human rights system.”  

Basyouni added that the use of torture to extract often false confessions is “endemic” in the Saudi justice system.